Non-cooperative Diagnosis of Submarine Cable Faults

Submarine cable faults are not uncommon events in the Internet today. However, their impacts on end-to-end path quality have received almost no attention. In this paper, we report path-quality measurement results for a recent SEA-ME-WE 4 cable fault in 2010. Our measurement methodology captures the path-quality degradation due to the cable fault, in terms of delay, asymmetric packet losses, and correlation between loss and delay. We further leverage traceroute data to infer the root causes of the performance degradation.